Still dropping – now below 10 Ph/s. Maybe the recent slip in the BTC value has made some of the big players think hard about the cost of running their rigs, although BTCguild hasn't dropped as much hashing power.

Anything less than +/= 4.5% per retarget is indistinguishable from variance. That is, if difficulty moves up or down by less than ~ 4.5%, you can't prove that the underlying hashrate has changed significantly.